Tevatron: Two in a row

For the second week in a row, the Tevatron collider has set a new record for weekly integrated luminosity, pushing the mark to 44.8 inverse picobarns. This corresponds to 13 percent more collisions than produced during the previous week. These luminosity charts show the improvement in luminosity over the last six years. Congratulations.

From the DZero Collaboration

The DZero RunIIb upgrade

This column is written by Vivian O'Dell, project manager for the DZero RunIIb upgrades.

After years of hard work, the DZero RunIIb upgrade has passed its final milestone,
called "CD-4" in politico-speak. For a project to meet this CD-4 milestone, a completion report has to be written, and I had the pleasure of writing this report
over the last few weeks. I am pleased to say that the upgrade finished on schedule and under budget. This means that as project manager of the upgrade, I can dust off my hands and declare victory. In fact, my future career goals involve never again uttering the acronyms EV, ACWP or
BAC.

My favorite section of the report was the section on "lessons learned" during
the project. It is really useful to sit back and go through all my notes
on what worked and what didn't and then encode them for a more general
dissemination. For example, the phrase "the project benefited from including value engineering" translated to "we realized that we would never get a particular board design
to work in the experiment so we scrapped it and started over."
Another coded lesson learned was, "the project benefited from being
flexible in operational needs." Translation: "If the
largest part of the upgrade is suddenly canceled, how can we possibly keep our current detector competitive?"
(The answer to this question was the layer 0 upgrade.)

Another part of installing the upgrade required us to physically remove
the old calorimeter trigger, and replace it with a much better trigger, able to operate in high luminosity. Had the upgrade installation failed, we could have not only failed to improve the detector, but we could have crippled it so severely that it would have become the world's largest paperweight.

But installing the upgrade went amazingly smoothly. The ability of our detector to track precisely
where particles go has improved in some cases by more than 50 percent, which
will show up in our data analyses that look for the decay of
b mesons.

One thing I wish I could have said in the "lessons learned" section of the
completion report, but at least I can say it here, is that when you work with world experts in detectors, electronics and physics, all you have to do is give them the tools they need and get out of their way. They will
solve problems that you thought were unsolvable.

So while my obligation to funky acronyms is a done deal, the upgraded DZero detector will collect high quality data for years to come.

In the News

LSST Press Release
January 5, 2007:

Google Joins Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Project

Google has joined a group of nineteen universities and national labs that are building the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).

Scheduled to begin operations in 2013, the 8.4-meter LSST will be able to survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its three-billion pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move rapidly: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids as small as 100 meters, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects. LSST is a public-private partnership.

The rest of the year

Pier Oddone

2007 promises to be a banner year for discovery at Fermilab. The performance of the accelerators in the last couple of months has been extraordinary. We have achieved monthly and weekly records for integrated luminosity, and the last Tevatron store broke 2.5 1032 cm-2 sec-1. We are also seeing the highest neutrino production rates ever. Fermilab and our facility users keep producing the most important results in the field, results that also show the great promise of the future. This provides the strongest foundation for an outstanding physics program in 2007. It will take much effort and sharp concentration, however, to realize the opportunities in front of us.

The present struggles and uncertainty over the shape of the FY2007 budget; the coming FY2008 budget to be unveiled at the beginning of February; and the policy discussions following the ILC reference design and cost estimate in the February/March time frame are all critical issues that raise many concerns. They can also distract us from the tasks before us. These uncertainties and policy issues must not interfere with our determination to take advantage of the great opportunities before us at Fermilab. The most powerful argument that we can bring to bear on these weighty issues is the value of what we produce.

Worries and concerns can also affect safety in the workplace--but only if we let them. Last year's Injury Reduction Panel concluded that most of the accidents at Fermilab occur not for lack of training or procedures but as the result of lapses in attention. I have often spoken of the need for continuous awareness to avoid injuries and to improve environmental safety and health. Just as it is important to keep a sharp focus on our physics productivity despite present concerns and uncertainties, it is likewise important to make a special effort to stay sharply focused on our safety and health.

Back from Iraq: Adim Yousif, an Accelerator Division employee who recently served in Iraq, spoke yesterday about his experiences there. "The Iraqis like to work off-the-cuff, which is great for emergencies that are unpredictable...but my job was to help them streamline it a little," he said. Since Yousif speaks Arabic, he was assigned to work at the Ministry of the Interior, Iraq's top policing agency, where he advised Iraqi staff on everything from dealing with emergency situations to managing shift changes. Yousif had to travel outside the heavily-fortified Green Zone to get to the Ministry of the Interior building each day. "I said a little prayer as I got armored up and went out to work," he said. Yousif has completed his service and will not be redeployed for at least three more years.

Announcements

Brown Bag Seminar on Internet Safety
Wellness Works presents a Brown Bag Seminar on Internet Safety titled,
"Avoiding Internet Predators and Scams,"
given by Justin Fitzsimmons Assistant States Attorney for Kane County.
The seminar will be held Wednesday, January 24, from noon to 1 pm in Curia II.

Flu Shots Still Available in the Medical Office/ WH GF-NW
It is worthwhile to get flu vaccine through the middle of February.
Free flu vaccine shots will be available to all active full-time employees, term
and temporary employees.
Call 840-3232 to schedule an office visit.